The Bank of Estonia bought €203 million's worth of bonds as part of the bond-buying program of the European Central Bank (ECB) in January.

The value of the central bank's asset purchase portfolio totaled €3.4 billion at year-end, it stands on the website of the Bank of Estonia.

The portfolio contains €62 million's worth of bonds of the Estonian state-owned electricity and gas transmission system operator Elering, which have not been among the purchases made by the central bank since May 2016. As of June last year, six central banks started acquiring corporate bonds on behalf of all euro area central banks.

Of Estonian companies, Elering and Eesti Energia meeet the terms of the ECB asset purchase program and their bonds are now bought by the Bank of Finland. In addition, corporate bonds are eing bought by the central banks of Belgium, Germany, Spain, France and Italy.

The expanded asset purchase program began in March 2015, with central banks of the eurozone buying €60 billion's worth of assets every month. The purchases were to continue until at least September 2016 and in any case go on until a lasting correction in inflation was apparent in line with the aim of the ECB to achieve inflation rates below but close to 2 percent over the medium term. The program was later extended until at least March 2017.

In April 2016, a decision of the ECB took effect to expand the program up to €80 billion's worth of bonds per month and to include in the program the bonds of investment-grade companies, with the exception of commercial banks.

Chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SDE) and former minister of health and labour, Jevgeni Ossinovski expects poverty in Estonia to decrease as an effect of the current government's income tax reform, though the actual impact will become clear only after data is evaluated next year.